tornado

Google Earth Imagery Updates: Tornadoes

July 6, 2017

Google recently updated the ‘historical imagery’ layer and on Tuesday we had a look at a couple of floods visible in the fresh imagery. Today we are looking at a number of tornadoes in the United States.

Elk City, Oklahoma.
On May 16th, 2017, an EF2 tornado caused major damage across the southern fringes of Elk City, Oklahoma causing one death and a number of injuries. Google Earth has a DigitalGlobe image captured just four days later.

Damaged houses in Elk City.

Interesting patterns in the fields caused by the tornado.

See the tornado and resulting damage from the ground in this YouTube video.

Eustace / Canton, Texas (two tornadoes).
On April 29th, 2017, two tornadoes occurred near Canton, Texas. See Wikipedia for a full description. We had a look at these tornadoes in May using Sentinel-2 imagery. Now there is higher resolution imagery from DigitalGlobe, captured just 6 days after the event. See below the paths of the tornadoes as far as we were able to track them in Google Earth imagery. The actual paths were longer and according to Wikipedia, the two eastern tracks shown was a single continuous tornado.

Destruction caused by the Canton / Fruitville tornado.

Hattiesburg, Mississippi and Adel, Georgia.
These were part of an outbreak of 81 tornadoes, the second-largest January tornado outbreak and the third-largest winter tornado outbreak since 1950, causing 20 deaths and US$1.3 billion in damage.

Although the Hattiesburg, Mississippi tornado occurred on January 21st, 2017, only part of its track has recent imagery. However, we were able to find the track in the imagery that exists. The tornado near Adel, Georgia occurred on January 22nd, and the imagery is from May 27th, 2017, four months later, but the track is still visible and the severe damage to Sunshine Acres mobile home park can be seen below:

Sunshine Acres mobile home park, Adel, Georgia.

According to Wikipedia, of the park’s roughly 100 homes, 45 were destroyed — 35 of which were obliterated. Although we don’t count that many structures, it is possible that many buildings were duplexes.

For the tracks of all the above tornadoes as far as we were able to trace them, download this KML file.

The Canton, Texas Tornados with Sentinel-2 imagery

May 29, 2017

On April 29th, 2017 a tornado tore through Canton, Texas leaving 5 dead and over 50 injured.

We had a look at the Sentinel-2 imagery of the region and we can see two tornado tracks across Canton:

Two tornado tracks near Canton, Texas.

There were tornadoes reported in nearby Eustace and Caney City. We suspect they are reports of the tornado shown on the left below.

Tornado tracks as far as we could trace them in Sentinel-2 imagery.

Zooming in on Canton, we can see how the track passed over several residential areas.

A section of the left (western) track shows a relatively straight right edge with curved tails coming off the left edge. We believe we can conclude from the shape that the tornado was rotating clockwise. We do not know which direction it was travelling (north or south).

Hopefully, we will see higher resolution DigitalGlobe imagery at a later date.

To see the relevant Sentinel-2 imagery in Google Earth, download this KML file. We have also included the locations of all US tornadoes of 2017 as listed on Wikipedia. Keep in mind that Wikipedia’s tornado locations are often far from accurate.

There have been a number of other strong tornadoes in May, but the relevant Sentinel-2 imagery is not yet available on AWS.

Google Earth Imagery Updates, Fire, Flood, Tornado!

January 2, 2017

Google recently updated the ‘historical imagery’ layer after nearly six months of no updates. So, there is a lot of interesting new imagery to see. Last week we had a look at some US wildfires. Today, we are staying with the US and having a look at some more wildfires, some floods and a tornado.

Blue Cut Fire, Cajon Pass, California
The Blue Cut Fire destroyed 105 homes and 213 other structures in August, 2016.

Pilot Fire, California.
The Pilot Fire took place just a short distance to the east of the above Blue Cut Fire. We can see the extent of the burn in Google Earth and a number of houses that were saved by effective firefighting. See the KML file at the end of this post for the location in Google Earth.

Cold Springs Fire, Colorado, July, 2016

We can see the fire in progress.

And we can see the burnt area in later imagery.

Some houses burnt by the Cold Springs Fire.

Baton Rouge, Louisiana Flooding
Back in August we used Sentinel-2 imagery to see the severe flooding in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Read more about the widespread Louisiana flooding event on Wikipedia.

There is now some DigitalGlobe imagery of Baton Rouge showing the flood in various stages:

Kokomo Tornado.
A number of tornadoes struck Indiana in late August, 2016, including one that hit Kokomo, Indiana, destroying a Starbucks in the process. The satellite imagery is not very good quality, although we can see the location of the Starbucks that was destroyed. There is however Street View from before and after the event showing that the Starbucks no longer exists:

See in Google Maps

To find the locations of the imagery above in Google Earth download this KML file

The Dolores, Uruguay Tornado

November 16, 2016

We have often looked at tornado tracks for the US and we recently looked at one in China but this is the first time we have come across one in South America.

According to Wikipedia it was an F3 rated tornado that struck the town of Dolores, Uruguay on April, 15th 2016. It destroyed at least 400 homes and buildings, killing five people and injuring more than 250.

Here are some ‘before and afters’ showing the damage caused:

Unfortunately Google has not updated the ‘historical imagery’ layer since June, so we cannot see all the imagery. Google has chosen only parts of the relevant imagery for the default layer. This is most likely because the other parts have cloud cover.

You can see a video of the tornado here.

To find the location in Google Earth download this KML file

Tornado tracks in Google Earth imagery

November 3, 2016

Last month we imported some placemarks from Wikipedia showing locations for all recorded tornadoes in the US for the last few years. We were hoping it would be useful for finding imagery of tornado tracks. However, it did not prove useful as the placemarks are based on reports of tornado sightings which are then later geocoded, probably based on the address provided by the person reporting it. This results in rather inaccurate locations overall.

So instead, we collected the locations of all the tornados we have covered in the past and also looked through the Google Earth historical imagery for more.

Tornado tracks. Red are tracks we have positively identified and blue are tracks we can see but have not yet matched to reported events.

We found the most tracks in Mississippi and Alabama. Although tornadoes are also common further north we believe that tornado tracks are much more visible in areas with forest than areas that are mostly open farmland. Damaged trees remain visible for a long time and are often cleared after the tornado, leaving visible strips of cleared land for years afterwards.

It is interesting that the majority of tracks follow approximately the same direction. Also interesting is just how long the tracks are. Many of them have clearly visible damage over 50 km and some more than 100 km.

To see the tracks in Google Earth, download this KML file. We have implemented it as a network linked KML file as we plan to update it over time.

Be sure to switch to historical imagery and check the appropriate dates to see relevant imagery for each tornado.

If any of our readers knows of more tornado tracks that are visible in Google Earth imagery, please let us know in the comments. We would especially love to find tracks in other countries as almost all of the identified tracks are in the US.